Why the World Needs Enterprise-Grade Data Protection for Open Source Virtualization

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Todd: Hello hello everybody. Hopefully we’re coming through okay. And of course drop any questions or if we’re not coming through okay drop some notes there in the chat. We’ll make sure we get on it we’ve got some people helping us out behind the scenes today. So just want to welcome everybody, I’ll say hello myself. So, I’m Todd Robinson from OpenMetal, and I’m very excited to have Pawel from Storware with us today. Just a little history on OpenMetal, but, and, and it’ll, it’ll really apply here. So I’m, I’m very excited to talk about Storware. And they’re, they’re one of these kind of organically built companies, spend a lot of time with customers.

Pawel, I think, is gonna share some stories with us today about being close to the customer and being able to understand their needs. But for me, I’m also really excited to learn some more about it. I’m a big open source fan, have been, you know, ever since the start of my career. Many, many years ago back, I used to do SHTML of all things, and I had to learn PERL and CGI and all this fun stuff back in the day.

But that’s carried forward. And so I’m excited about Storware because they kind of bridge a, a a a very needed space between some of the closed source systems that are out there, VMware style, et cetera. And the open source space OpenStack. So again, I’m very excited. We are an OpenStack specialist company.

We automated creation of OpenStack fully managed sorry, fully ready to go day two, kind of ready systems backed by Ceph and deployed instantly, essentially on top of three servers and then customers can be off and running. And so we’re a big fan of helping the open source community be more effective in being able to address these mid-size companies.

And so Storware and Pawel’s joined us today. Yeah. So Pawel, if you don’t mind, give us a little background on yourselves and we’ll go from there. 

Pawel: Yep. So thanks for having me here. So, really. Really appreciate to be a part of this episode. So, Todd like you said, my story’s a little bit different.

I wasn’t always a fan of open source, but I tell you why I changed my mind. You know, because I started as a Windows administrator and I thought that, you know, I did all of the, you know, windows certification part, and I believe that my first journey will be staying as an admin in a Windows world. That everything changed when I, when I started the work in IBM and I saw the AIX system and the power and the Unix world, and then I realized that, oh, maybe I’m on the wrong side or, or the dark side of the moon.

So I decided to little bit more deep dive into the Unix system. Then the, the Linux part starting to come around and of course the backup platforms and. It’s many times because I’m one of the founders and many times when somebody asking me how you, because we’ve been as a store, one of the first companies who actually cared about the KVM-based ecosystem and Xen based ecosystem as a backup vendor.

So many times I got the question, how you founded this niche and how you founded this, this need. And to be honest fully transparent, it wasn’t my idea. I took it from one of the customers because they realized me that, hey, Pawel, you need to look. It was 2015. And they said to me, don’t focus on the VMware in a Hyper-V, especially in the backup space.

Everybody is going there. It’s more than 100 different vendors that are trying to be number one and number two, number three. So they will, you know, fighting against each other to get this biggest piece of the market. But open your eyes and realize how big space is in a Xen-base hypervisors and a KVM-based hypervisors.

And the good part is that the first POC that we’ve done in two, it was 2015 when the customer acquired us to build a backup from the, the first one was actually Citrix then. To IBM Spectrum Protect and we built this bridge. We did a POC. We successfully made it and guess so they didn’t get it from us, the software, because they, they, they took a Commvault and said, we don’t want to be a first one.

Right. So other was then, let’s say then the beginning of thinking about there is something beyond the VMware. So it’s 10 years ago, and then we met many of the US customers that they started to have a KVM-ish, KVM based projects. And they asked us the same, given us the opportunity to have enterprise grade data protection.

That’s why I proposed this kind of the subject, because they said that time that nobody cares about the KVM itself. And it was pity because what, what I realized that KVM, from the percentage point of view. Let’s say, we can say it’s still niche technology. We have, let’s say 10, 15% of the overall virtualization market as a, let’s say, open source community.

But if we will see what changed actually is the last, since, since the last 10 years, is the, what kind of the customers on the managed service providers is actually using the KVM. This is the more important lesson. 

Todd: Mm-hmm. 

Pawel: Even if we’ll say, come back before the Broadcom acquisition that we’ll speak about later on.

So we noticed in early stage that KVM, this is the place where we would like to be. And this is how we started the first KVM let’s say legacy pro data protection in late 2015. And it goes on in last 10 years through right now, more than 10 different KVM distributions. So I’m really proud that we, we took a lesson and we are right now the only vendor worldwide who has this kind of, the wide range of the KVM based functionalities.

And we do not, let’s say, afraid to saying that we are one of the top choices. And of course we are fighting for to be a number one here. Or other vendors trying to be in this journey, but we’ll talk about it later on. 

Todd: Yeah, very nice. No, no. And I got a couple follow follow up questions that I know we’re gonna get to.

But one, I I always, you know, I always liked repeating this, so, I have the luxury I guess, of working with a lot of CEOs and seasoned executives that have worked through a lot of startups, run large organizations or run organizations that are quite mature. And you, and you guys are kind of that mid spot, which is like a really exciting time.

But this concept of being close to the customer and like you described, look, we didn’t get that deal. But we, we felt the pain that the customer had, we understood how to address that. And then we, we, we held onto that. We looked at that and said, you know what? This is gonna go somewhere. And then you hear it again from somebody else, or then you hear it from another customer.

And at some point you start, as you start to adapt to those needs make all the differences. So something I think I just share that I always like to share as just general business advice is be close to the customer, particularly when you’re in a product development process. Or you know, or if you’re in that startup mode being close to the customer, they’re gonna tell you what pain they’re willing to pay for to solve, to be solved.

And so, yeah, again, I’m, I’m excited that this happened organically. I’m excited you, yeah, you switched off of the Windows world. I think everybody, everybody has a little bit of the Windows skill, but I have to say, yeah, I’m not very skilled. Definitely in the data center. But not, not, we are not very skilled.

But, but running Windows of course on OpenStack that’s a different thing. But yeah. So then, yeah, if you don’t mind, then maybe jump forward to talk a little bit about how, how the product is today, what are you seeing as common use cases that are, that for our listeners here would say. Okay.

Got it. I see where you guys fit in and I see if you guys can help me or not, but yeah, if you don’t mind, maybe mm-hmm. Talk a little bit about today and, and, and who would find you guys most valuable? 

Pawel: So today, today we are in, let’s say I. It’s 10 years of, you know, working as a company today. And we believe in that.

We actually just starting the journey, or we are in the middle on one of the third of the whole, let’s say, product cycle. Because the backup vendors they stay alive like 20, 30 years. If they are successful, then there is a technology depth and you need to start over. So we, we believe in that we are in a great spot because after we gathered and protect more than 10 different virtualization and, and hypervisors, we’ve seen the need, we call the data gravity.

What I, what I noticed is that. Customers, they don’t want to feel congested or put into the only one technology. And, and it’s going the same with the, with the, with the backup vendor. So, you know, the most typical, let’s say set it up was in the last 10 years was VMware plus Veeam, VMware plus Commvault.

And everybody used to have it. And it’s natural because Veeam equals VMware. So please purchase it. But what if we would like to replace the VMware and the Veeam? What if we’ll move into, for example, the one of the KVM based hypervisors, or if we have much more bigger picture idea and we like to build a private cloud base on the OpenStack, then there is no simple answer.

VMware cannot cope with it. And the Veeam and the other vendors also have the same problems. So they’re saying, okay, we need to build a separate island for the KVM or for the OpenStack. What we proposed as a vendor it’s hard to say no vendor locking because always you need to align some vendor.

But we, when we showing our architecture, we tell into the customers or partners that you have a. Freedom of choice philosophy. So you have a more than you have today, four major virtualization engines. So VMware, HyperV, KVM, and Xen. And we will help you to moved from one virtualization engine to another.

And this is actually the latest feature that we proposed on the market like two weeks ago. It’s a V2V migration. Mm-hmm. So when you have a VMware backup, you can move from the backup into using the V2V into the OpenStack. Because we’ve seen the significant growth of the inquiries related to what is the real alternative for, for the for the VMWare right now.

And because we are much more focusing on the mid-size customers and enterprise customers, one of our, let’s say, recommendation is always OpenStack. It, it wasn’t a recommendation five, six years ago when I started the OpenStack journey. It was too complicated for me. But when I met the companies as a OpenMetal, as the other friends, I realized that it’s a huge strength in this kind of the offering.

And you can have a OpenStack as a simplified package with the great services behind the scenes. And so what we, what we notice is that our goal as a backup vendor is to provide customers this freedom of choice and help them to migrate the different, let’s say data based on a different, let’s say place or the space where this data resides.

So that’s why this data gravity will be more and more important for most of the, let’s say, market and enterprises that I see on the market. 

Todd: Yeah, I, I, I’ll double up on that because for us you know, kind of our specialty is this private cloud and this big storage systems. But a common issue that we have is when new customers wanna come into us they are faced with this challenge of like, okay, I am moving.

Right? And, and there are good, good reasons to do it, but it creates a bubble of effort on their side. And so in some cases, like this is a specifically for, for us as OpenMetal wide, we’re very interested in being like close to companies like Storware. And anybody that sits in this field is, it’s actually it’s a barrier for us to sell too.

To say like, okay, you’ve got this I’ll just use some examples. You’ve got this a hundred thousand dollars problem over here on, on a public cloud, but you, you have to move a lot of this. Some, some companies will have a sufficient kind of a let’s say cloud native skills where they it’s kind of an infrastructure as code recreation process.

And so they can say, oh, well actually I can just recreate that. Also, I’ll just point it to, to you guys. I got the Terraform, I got the OpenStack provider. I’ll recreate that and it’ll start ingesting the data. And, and so their move process is more like, okay, just fire it up over here. It starts to fill itself up and then I’ve gotta settle some stuff out.

But that’s I don’t know, maybe 20% 80% they’re coming and saying like, I have workloads that have to be moved and, and how do we do this? I’m coming out of VMware, I’m coming out of one of the big public clouds. And so for me this is very present for us because without more maturity, which you guys are bringing, which is awesome, it, it’s a barrier for us.

So we’re like, oh, okay, well how do we be part of that? How do we engage? And so even on our side, I think one of the ways we, we, we met also was we try to, for, for companies that are helping push forward the OpenStack world or the Ceph world we’re happy to provide hardware and systems to help people test on this and understand how it is because we’re definitely dependent on more and more maturity, like out of your business.

So yeah. One is, it’s, I, I saw the release so I, I was definitely excited about that. I don’t know if you want to talk more about that or if you’ve got enough out about Yeah. What you guys are doing. Actually, if you don’t mind, maybe a little more on just what we, what was recently released, a little, maybe a little more detail.

If you wanna throw in a little bit of the tech depending on how much you wanna get into. I think we probably have some technical listeners. Yeah. Yeah, go for it. If you don’t mind. ’cause I, I’m very excited myself to, 

to understand.

Pawel: So last, last three years, because when you would say it’s about all of our releases we’re trying to release like once a quarter.

We decided, okay, that each release need to be also related to the OpenStack, and that’s OpenStack is, let’s say, one of our top choices. So we, we made this, let’s say, long-term decision that we believe in in the OpenStack community. We believe in what the OpenStack and Infras, you know, all of the OpenStack and all of the ecosystem related to OpenStack can do in the future.

And to be honest, there is not, you know, after this two years of Broadcom acquisition, you know, there was the hundreds of the thousands of the different inquiries, really all, all of the market, they ask the question who is actually the real alternative for the VMware? And, and I’ve even thought two years ago that this, this, let’s say answer is much, is more simple as I thought.

Yes and it, but it’s not. Actually really easy to, you know, get off from the VMware train because it’s, you need to be aware that every, it’s, it’s a huge change. It’s a mindset change. It’s a way how you navigate it. But many times when I speak with my partners or even our ourself in our data centers or the customers, I’m saying, why, why, when you would, if you already made a statement that you’ll leave the VMware, why would not look for the technology that will give you a chance to build the competitive advantage in the next few years?

So do not only look for the replacement, but look for the, let’s say framework that will give you the boost if your business will change drastically. So to be honest, I’m not a huge fan of replacing VMware into the typical KVM hypervisor. I’m more fan to use the OpenStack. Or lately we also come started to cooperate with the also US based companies like Scale Computing.

So VirtIO. So they build in the HCI based on the KVM, and we’ve seen that we need to give something extra, not virtualization to virtualization because the typical replacement is not enough. The, you know, after, imagine that you’re the VMware admin, you’re certified in the last 20 years, you’ve been 20, 30, 30 times in Barcelona or in, in, somewhere in the US on you know, VMware explorer or the other parts.

You have your own badges from the VMware and somebody going to you and saying, ah, we have idea. You, you’ll do the new thing in the next three months. So the first thing is a panic mode. Can I cope with it? Will I be do the as good as I was in a VMware? So it’s a psychological, you know, refusal.

And it’s not related to the technology at all. It’s more about is it this my safe zone? And we know that if we are getting older and it’s not we are much more harder to make a change if we are really young. Like when in the twenties or thirties. It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s so much 

Todd: you try, but you’re speaking truth.

Pawel: Yeah. Yeah. 

Todd: You try, you try to be more adaptable. You are speaking truth. 

Pawel: Of course. And you know, I’m, I, I over 40, so I still trying to be as adaptive as possible. And I believe I will be in it 20 years. I’m working on it. But, you know, when we take took about, take the statistics, more people, if they get in age, they are great, but they don’t want, they less willing to have a change.

And we know that, so my thought after these two years, it’s, it’s not about the technology. It’s about to find a proper, let’s say, the safe zone for all of the people related, especially in the IT industry, to believe that this change will given them the chance. Because from the financial perspective, it’s much more easy to, you said you have 100 K maintenance, which is five times more expensive than it used to be.

So from the CFO or from the IT manager who’s getting or getting paid for some cutting, cutting, cut, cutting the prices from the existing vendor. This is the beauty spot to look for the alternative. But I’m talking about more about the, the techy deep dive transition that is much more harder for us as a vendors, as a OpenMetal, as a story to come.

So, you know, I have the same problem when I come to the Veeam. Or Commvault customers is first thing. Why you, why you are so small. You’re only 80 or 100 per people company. When we were three of us for the first three years, we heard we will not purchase from you the software because, we’ll, we’ll not know where we, you, where, where you will be in a two or three years.

After five years we heard show me at that you have at least 100 customers. When we show the 100 customers, we have another, let’s say step forward that we need to go. Right now you are to small scale. How I, how I get this guarantee, but to be honest, I don’t want to be a bigger as a company. Because if, if company, if you know, the cost of growing so fast is the lack of the adaptability and you know, the personal relation between the partner.

Mm-hmm. Customers. So I always say. You wanna go to the 5,000 customer 5,000 company from the backup vendor, you will be let’s say the some column in the spreadsheet. Do not believe that somebody will take it in person. What, what I still love and do in a daily basis is trying to get satisfied or sometimes even dissatisfied.

Customers go on a zoom and speak with them directly. And this is what you thought said as a startup, let’s say mindset, ask what they need, and they see the difference between the biggest players and, and, and us. But coming back to this VMware and the psychological part, the, the major challenge these days are the, the willing to, to make a change, to make a change for the better future.

Todd: Yeah, what we have found that as well too. And, and I think early on we had accepted that was gonna be a barrier to overcome and for OpenStack and, and, and Ceph, I’ll, I’ll talk a little more about Ceph. ‘Cause it’s definitely an unsung, a little bit of an unsung hero behind the scenes providing a lot of this storage and doing it like brilliantly.

But for us that was acknowledging that the barrier of adoption is often like, can I get my hands on it easily? So I have to build up a certain level of trust with this so that I can have the expertise that I, I might have accrued with you know, VMware or on one of the clouds for many, many years.

Like you said, I’ve got the badge. I’m familiar. I I’m branded. I I like that. I like it. But practically, and in some cases, this is for us. What is. The company literally can’t afford it. What? They cannot pass those costs onto their end customer, so they have to make some of these changes. But so for us, that was why and my team still and, and, and I’ll throw out that I still struggle a bit with, we have these very small.

Clouds that are built on these very small servers and in, in the long run, it’s not actually practical to run a a serious large workload on it. But they actually exist and we automated them to, with quite a bit of hassle because the small servers really can be tricky with Ceph and OpenStack all demanding, particularly resources on really small things.

But we did that because then it allows us to say, you’re uncomfortable with it because you’ve never gotten your hands on it. Or if you are familiar with OpenStack from years ago, you’re like, oh boy, this thing is gonna be a bear to get up and running. Which, and in a lot of cases it still is.

This is one of our secret sauces, which I’m definitely excited and proud about, is you can hit the button and have it for like 45 seconds later kind of thing. So these systems are like three quarters prebuilt. And they can actually build from nothing in like 45 minutes, but you can have ’em at 45 seconds. ’cause our system is, is kind of warm, rotating ’em. But it overcomes some of those barriers to say, you got a set of people that are familiar with this technology, give ’em a couple clouds, go on there, drop a node, see what happens. Understand how Ceph is gonna start lighting up and saying, Hey, I’m, I’m in a degraded state right now. I’m running fine for serving stuff, but you should know one of your drives is down. You know, what do you wanna do about that? And so that, that was a real key part for us. So it’s acknowledging very much what you’re talking about is that as companies come to realize they have to have some alternatives you know, how do you step into that?

And it’s a team decision. These are typically pretty good sized companies and it’s a team decision, and it’s a, and even if there’s an advocate. In the company, they need tools themselves to go to the rest of their organization and say, Hey, this is not as hard as you might think it is. There’s a lot of maturity in, in OpenStack and Ceph.

There’s good backup systems that are got, that are well documented that you can clearly see that maybe are integrated with other systems like notifications systems or PagerDuty or whatever, right? So that you, you have these systems that will feel very familiar once you’ve spent a little bit of time in them.

But I would also say, I think for OpenStack, the OpenStack community. We still need more of that. We still need more of this documentation, more of these real world use cases and proof that the things that you typically able to do on these other systems can be done here. So one of our customers actually was asking about big data structures.

So they were using Databricks on top of Azure, and they were like, they went to get their quote after they did their POC, and they’re like, that’s, that’s impossible. I can’t that. Mm-hmm. So they came to us and said, Hey, you know, we know, we know what’s underneath it. What is the open source alternative to this?

And so I said, well, okay, it’s gonna be spark on top of Delta Lake and it’s gonna be with an S3 compatible. API behind it with your storage, right? And so we had one of our engineers take the, take the time to basically set their, set up their fundamental open source only kind of Databricks replica.

And it’s just one of those where yeah, absolutely you can do that. Ceph has the compatibility to supply the it’s not ACID, but it’s something similar to that, to, to supply the data consistency that a lot of these big data systems, Zooz, Delta Lake, ClickHouse, these kind of systems require that. So I was gonna say, I was gonna give Ceph a shout out here, because Ceph is a rock solid system.

I, I know they’re doing a lot of improvements to take advantage of the NVME performance that they’re still working on, but this is a tried and true system that supports so many of these, new technologies that are, especially the big data world that require you to have kind of like a hot layer and then, and then a cool data layer that is gonna be pushed off the object storage.

And so anyways, I’ve kind of given Ceph a shout out here. That it, it is very important inside of this ecosystem as well. And so OpenStack many times is actually leveraging Ceph behind the scenes. You know, you may not see Ceph as much, but but yeah. And then I have one other story actually, if you don’t mind, I’ll switch back.

Pawel: No, no, of course. 

Todd: Yeah. On the Ceph, on the side, if you don’t mind just a little bit about your familiarity. What, talk to me a little bit about that, and we’re happy to chat a little bit on that. If I can provide more info on the Ceph side.

Yeah. So if you’re, yeah, if, depending on where you kind of want to go with that, if you wanna dig into Ceph a little bit or we can, we can keep going.

Pawel: From the Ceph perspective, you know that we, we’ve been one of the first actually one of the two first companies who have a, we love when we have a Ceph behind the scene in the OpenStack.

This is our, let’s say favorite, let’s say combination. Plus, we’ve seen that there, there are many Ceph storages standalone, that they don’t want to do the backup by the, you know, adding the replica on managing the snapshots. So they looking for also, what if the store could ha, could you have, could you take this disadvantage and giving us, let’s say, the, all of the philosophy, all of the retention, the different backup destination that you can cope with and believe.

What we noticed there is also a, a many inquiries from the field asking about the Ceph data protection. Of course, if you go to the Ceph admins, so I, I remember the same, same conversation with the, the OpenStack guys or the, you know, Kubernetes guys. If you have a proper configuration of the Kubernetes OpenStack, you don’t need to have a backup.

And I always say, okay, yes and no. Yes and no. Of course you can design, but it’s more design for the DR purposes. But what, because I have a replication beauty. But what, but you know, that every ransomware, every problem is also replicated to the other side. 

Todd: Yeah. 

Pawel: So this, this is the different story, but we have a snapshot, but we need to do it manually.

What if your admin will change? Maybe there is, you should put this requirements, or let’s say the responsibility for, for the third party vendors. So you know, nobody asking why you need the VMware. Third party backup. Everybody could know that you could snapshot it from the VMware, but this is how the world works.

You take the first party who only specialize in this area. Same with the OpenStack, same in the OpenShift, same with in the Kubernetes. And the funny part, what we noticed is that when the typical virtualization admins going into the OpenStack or the OpenShift or the Kubernetes world, they have a problems to, you know, think about the stateless, the stateful affirmeral, not ephemeral volumes.

Mm-hmm. So they many times treated the, in which instance in the OpenStack as a one-to-one VM. Even if we have a totally different philosophy in the OpenStack. So that’s why still, I believe there is a lots of you said about this, you know, community staff, better documentation. I think it’s. It’s still huge amount of building the awareness and education part, what we, what, what we need to be done.

What I loved in the OpenMetal when we first met and discussed is when I saw that you totally focused and devoted to, to build the simplicity from the configuration, you know, set and forget philosophy, which is, to be honest, one of the most important thing, especially in the OpenStack world, because we would like to have this tons of the different range of the capabilities, but closed into the one single box without thinking what type of the services I should be run on, what are the dependencies between, between them and what I’m thinking.

Is that most of the people that they looking for, the OpenStack, when they go into the forum, they are a little bit shocked because they started to reading about these dependencies, et cetera, and they do not believe, and they heard about the OpenStack 10 years ago and they still worry about, okay, I need to have at least 10 people to cope with it if they, you know, if most of the people you know tested OpenMetal plus Storware, believe me, the, they will change their perception about that.

It don’t need to be so sophisticated, complicated, but I have a huge tool that will give me something extra for the future purposes and it’s still our goal, but also the OpenStack community goal to, you know, talk about it, talk about it. We, you know, learn, educate, meet people one-to-one.

And do hundreds of even thousands of the different POCs. Yeah. But what, what I see, it’s raised not because of the VMware, because everybody thinks that people looking for the alternative because of the Broadcom. No, no, no. It was started before the Broadcom acquisition.

People need to find something new, fresh, different. 

Todd: Yeah. No, and something along those lines. ’cause there is a lot of fear even you could say about OpenStack. But I, I was just, I was kind of racking my brain as you were talking about this is, I’m trying to think if, if customers when they have come on board with us, if they were able or not able to just pull in the additional kind of sets of tasks that an admin will have to do.

And before it used to be, yeah, you pretty much were gonna have a suite of OpenStack specialists. But a lot of times that was to architect it not to run it. And in this case, since you, it’s already architected and it’s, and you can see how it’s been architected. And there’s and we, we basically control and run things by Ansible.

So if there’s minor modifications it still holds true to the base level so that whenever we release new generations, the base Ansible is still there and can absorb these new changes. So you can keep your version moving up, even though you may have, you know, 10% of your cloud is customized. And I’m just, I’m really, I’m gonna have to rack my brain, but, no company one that is very large, that is gonna actually pull in some additional time, energy and person on their side to, to run the things. But most operational teams, like let’s say you’re running a, a big VMware cluster, you’re running a thousand VMs or something like that in a public cloud.

You’ve got an operational team that knows how to do this stuff. They have these skill sets. They’re sophisticated administrators. They just need time to train and they need a, a system that is, doesn’t have, we call it like staff to VM ratio. You, you just can’t have a small ratio, right?

Like, so you have to be able to manage lots of resources in a relatively straightforward way. So it doesn’t become a burden on any, you know, administrative team. And I, honestly, it’s one I think many large customers. They, they just actually had their current operations team follow our guides, learn a little bit about it, get it connected up to their operate their 24-7 operations team in case anything comes up.

We handle a bunch of the 24-7 if there’s certain stuff inside there that’s like hardware related. And it is just nowhere near as scary or burdensome to run these things. And as the stuff continues to mature, that’s why. And I, I was gonna actually, I was gonna make sure we listed your release.

So actually if you don’t, we got Sash and Lauren maybe on the, on the behind the scenes here for us. If you guys don’t mind get that the 7.1 release for Storware, drop the link into the mm-hmm the chat here, just so that people can check that out. But again, this maturity is here. And sorry, I’ll tell you one more story and then I know we’ve got another couple points we wanted to get through.

Yeah, you had mentioned you know, kind of listening to the customer, but then also, hey, you know, I want to be number one kind of in this KVM space because so many other ones are around there, but I think you’re probably at that spot now too, where you’re like, okay, actually I can see other places to go after.

And we’re starting to like broaden ourselves. Right. Still wanna be, I think number one, like you said, but this is years ago, so I think I mentioned earlier on, I have a lot of luxury of having a lot of CEO kind of coaches. And one of my closest friends is a, is a brilliant startup guy many, many times through and so

and this was a couple years ago, and he’s like, and I’m like, we’re, we’re gonna, we’re gonna automate this OpenStack and Ceph system because I can see this pressure coming. So whether it’s what’s gonna, what, what ended up happening with VMware but also the big clouds is where I was looking to go like, wow, they are so absurdly expensive that it’s just like messing up so many business models.

I’m like, that’s just like, that’s not right. Like you’re literally holding back mid-size companies because you’re, you’re, you’re, you’re basically taking these margins that are just absurd, right? Like AWS subsidizes, they take a AWS profits and subsidize Amazon’s store, right? Like this is a known thing, right?

And then you got people. You got their competitors buying from Amazon even. And, and when Amazon is subsidizing a, the Amazon AWS sorry, subsidizing the Amazon store. And so, and he was just like, you’re crazy, I mean, you know, first he used different language than that. He’s like, you’re an idiot.

Why would you ever build something to go up against an AWS or an Azure? And well, first off is because of that thing. And he, to be honest, for the first couple years he was right, right? Like, he was like, wow, this is pretty tough. But the shift has occurred where people are starting, companies are realizing that like, I need the alternative.

I need this system. And I’m over this tipping point. I’m, I’m spending hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. You’re over that tipping point. You don’t have to buy from these systems anymore. You can buy from the open source world. You’re past that tipping point. But for us, and I think that’s where I love you guys.

Make, you have to make these systems easier, and we have to, as an ecosystem, work together on them. There’s no way that we can practically as a group go up again, unless we go as a group. We can’t go up against VMware and Broadcom. Realistically, we there is no single entity inside of the our ecosystem that can do that.

People might say Red Hat, but that Red Hat’s focused at the very high end, much, much larger. Who is there helping those mid-size companies that so much, they’re the ones stuck at the moment. They’re the ones paying these crazy new VMware prices or they’re paying these crazy cloud prices. So I always say, like, for me, I’m very excited to see so much more maturity in the system.

But knowing that we’ve got a ways to go. But that also for customers who are, are looking at this. This is also like a brilliant time to partner with companies because. The, they’re all listening. You’re listening. I’m listening. We’re all listening because this market is going, like, we’re, we’re in the right spot.

I got to go back to my friend and go like, yeah, you told me you didn’t. And he’s like, whatever, you know, screw you. You were right, but whatever. You know? So, but it’s great then. And so I would encourage people like, it’s, it’s a great ride. And hopefully we get joined by more and more of these companies that believe in like, look, I can understand the fundamental open source stuff more clearly and I can be on this ship.

And then I’ve got companies like store word that will help me do these pieces that can be very worrisome if you don’t do them. Right. Right. So anyways, I’ll get off my soapbox there and we could jump to some new questions, but I’ve lost my way. So if you know what the next question, what, what we’re supposed to talk about next, I’ll go to you.

Pawel: The beauty, beauty is being in a data protection is that. We are, let’s say in the mandatory zone. So nobody will questions, if you will, go into the production of the other virtualization or whatever virtualization shall you purchase the backup software. So this is the good news for us as a vendor that this is the obligatory parts, especially.

Unfortunately because of the huge amount of the malware ransomware attacks everybody knows right now that the data is the 21st century oil. And this is the most significant assets that the company have to have these days. So the good option is that we know that every, and this. We’ll have, I’d say thousands of the different customers who will choose the alternative path.

They will always ask the question, okay, to whom I should, with whom I should speak, and who actually is the, the, the first one? What I noticed also, and this is where I see also that I’m ahead of the competition, is that I know how it was hard to master the KVM and especially the OpenStack ecosystem to fully understand it.

You know, we needed like five years to get to the point that we understand the 80% of the implementation because every implementation can may vary. It’s not the same. We, we have the same API, but the different type of the configuration. So this is a huge for us because when I see right now that the Veritas was purchased by Cohesity or I see that there are some other players who started to thinking about the KVM and the OpenStack ecosystem. I’m, I’m pretty sure that even if they release the first version, they will, they will need a couple of extra months or years to master it. And this is what I see from the customer. They saying, okay, we test it, but we would like to go with you.

Because they see the trusted advisor that they started, that we started this journey, not because of the market movement mm-hmm. But because of our, let’s say, long-term vision and the part of the investments. Because many times my people even ask me why we doing it? It’s so. Difficult. And I said, I love the difficulties because nobody would, like, nobody will want, nobody want to be in a space where you have a much more work to do than less.

So be there. It giving you additional, the advantage against the others. So and maybe because we as a, you know board of members and founders like the challenges and we, we feel comfortable in a zone that other people are, are not. Yes. Because they always looking for the shortcuts and maybe because it is, it’s of my parents, I do not believe it because I saw how much they need to put they work and it’s not, let’s say the sprint but the marathon.

So that, that’s why I said after 10 years I see that we just is the one of the third of the journey of, that’s a long, long term investment. And the time and the energy that you need to spend to to build the proper position. 

Todd: Yeah. Got it. All right. I know we’ve run through a few things but I think we also wanted to just maybe get a little guidance on if you were thinking about building a backup as a service.

Yeah. I don’t know if you wanna take us through kind of your perspective. I know it’s a bit of a, there’s a lot obviously to it, but yeah, share some insights for us. ’cause I think these are, this’ll expose I think a lot of, of what’s going on with Storware and how you might actually approach a problem like that.

Pawel: Mm-hmm. This is actually happens naturally because when we started to be one of the top choices for the managed service providers who actually already started the KVM and the OpenStack journey, they said, okay, we have a base. And one of the first services that is always related to the managed service provider is a backup as a service because it’s so natural.

Monitoring, billing or let’s say the some application layers plus backup as a service. So bus. So we noticed it and we said, okay, because we have, we built our architecture with the full restful API and we from the scratch providing the, the documentation how to easily integrate. We built the Horizon plugin.

Which allowing us to work per tenant in the OpenStack with all of the billing and understanding the differences between the different projects availability zones and, and multi-tenants in the OpenStack. So it means that when you are managed service provider giving the new project for your customer, you can easily expose the backup and recovery features for those, for those tenant, which is also only filtered and related to this tenant.

So customer can play for the backup for their own and you can centralize charge and centralize all of the management and the data protection as a super admin from the OpenStack perspective. And, and it started, and we, we’ve seen, we we selling it as a subscription model with the pay as a grow model.

So this is a beauty spot. And I encourage every managed service provider who thinking about the backup as a service to start a conversation with us. Because there is not, let’s say investment that we saying, okay, you need to start from thousand or 3000 monthly. Then we started the cooperation. No, you can start even from the scratch.

If we see that you have some business plan the, the way how you grow, you can, you can play with us starting from the zero into with the pay as you Grow model with the subscription per VM per instance. And, you know, this is the perfect win-win scenario when both parties are, you know, looking for the growth and they’re satisfied about this offering.

So from us, backup as a service is 90% related to the OpenStack configurations. Right now, we, we will invest also in the Skyline. So this is behind the, behind the doors, behind the scenes information. Okay. We’ve seen, we’ve seen the, we’ve seen the need we speak with the vendors and we analyze it and we see that the sky is a part of, it’s a, let’s say, matter of time that OpenStack community would like to show the Skyline is so, let’s say new fresh UI with the simplified philosophy.

So we are already put on our roadmap, this investment as to building the plugin also to provide the backup as a service solution. 

Todd: Yeah. Very nice. Yeah. For background everybody, the Skyline project is meant to be an eventual successor to Horizon. Horizon. Been around for a long time. Tried, tried and true, but has some of those issues from being built at the time that it was.

So yeah, I think a lot of people are following Skyline, kind of going, okay, what, where’s, where’s the tipping point? Because it does feel like it’s probably approaching at this point. Okay. But yeah. But, so anyways, that’s just background for everybody. But if you don’t mind then maybe describe what would be typically behind the the backup as service?

What would be the architecture of the system that’s actually supporting this stuff. 

Pawel: Based on the size of the numbers of the compute nodes that you will have as a managed service providers. So we always started, we have an architecture three T architecture. So we have an agent, if you need the agent on the operating system, you don’t need it.

You have a node, which, which is actually the data mover that needs to be installed on, on the OpenStack cluster as one of the VMs. Because in most cases we use a disc attachment strategy. So we have a instance level full and incremental forever approach. So we attach the, we doing a snap, we attach this disk into the VM proxy, and the node is sending the data to the backup destination.

And backup destination can be the local storage, can be Ceph, can be object storage. In most cases. We encourage to have a file system based on the XFS. When you have a XFS, we can also provide you the immutability feature. We can provide you the synthetic backup option to have a secondary data and many other things.

So XFS, let’s say it’s our sweet spot from the file system. We also introduced the ZFS as a, let’s say, file system with the, the duplication and compression. We used to use video, so visual data optimizer, which was in Acento and a Red Hat. But we don’t like the way.

Can be even more straightforward. We don’t like that. Nobody’s caring about it, so, yeah. So, you know, it was acquired, it was maintained, but not invested. And I don’t like, I don’t like the projects that they don’t have a longevity investments, but this is how it goes in the big players. You purchase the purchase the products, and nine of 10 you’ll kill in the long term perspective, and you’re just keeping, keeping one of those.

So we decided to move from the virtual data optimizer in short video into the ZFS and it looks really promising. We have a really good dedupe ratio compression. ZFS is great when you’re doing the snapshotting replication part. So this will be, you’ll see in the next Storware releases more ZFS integration.

And after you’re sending you, you need to also have a server component that managing Orchestrate has, has its own catalog metadata of the backups and the UI or the restful API or the web or the CLI interface. So you stand from OneNote one server and if you get in bigger, we will add additional nodes.

It, because you can, you can have a geolocation, different data centers. So the nodes always stays local, but can, they can be managed from the one single server. So you, it doesn’t matter how many nodes you have, you have always single pane in glass from one UI and you, you have some custom configuration.

You decided how, what node can see, you can have a different node in, in the same configuration. They can work as a load balancing. So we are ready for really big environments, like 10,000 instances plus. But you can start also from the five 10. Depends even instances. As, as, as a base. So beauty is that you have this small footprint in the beginning especially with the customers comparing us or partners to the other players they see that this, let’s say hardware footprint is much more lower than the in the competition. And we can scale out and scale out options. So adding the new nodes, giving you the better performance and the way to manage it. 

Todd: Got it. Got it. Okay. 

Yeah, I think Lauren’s getting the probably your marketing page up there, but if you’ve got a tech page for that, that’s probably would be great to get that up there just so people can click through and find out.

Some more about that. Yeah. So I, I’ve got one, one more area I think that I wanted to chat about, but Yeah. Inside there and understood about the ZFS and those 

Pawel: it’s not Todd, it was not a, you know, we started with the Open D-loop. We, then we moved into the the video ZFS I everything because I decided we will not build the duplication by our own.

I would like to take it as a granted from the community. But it’s not simple, it’s not easy in Open D for example, we have a great deduplication ratio, but we couldn’t restore the data. It is quite challenging when you send in the backup that you can’t restore. So we got rid of, from the development really, really fast.

It was last, like few months in our R&D session. Video has, its great. Potential, but it cannot, it’s not, it’s good for the small environments, like 10, 20 terabytes, but we get more customers that they move in petabytes plus. So we need to have something that we can cope with. 

Todd: Well, one thing I would say too, this is, this does go back to my, I, I keep giving my pitch that we are a community.

The only way I think to really, truly be successful is to be a community around that. And, you know, this stuff to the level of detail. You know, I, I, in my area, we have ours, right? Like we have our, our place like no, this has to be a predictable OpenStack. It has to pass these tests, it has to spin up easily.

The documentation’s gotta be clear, but there’s no question we have to depend on the ecosystem yourselves for example, to who love these parts of it, because it, this is, this is a lot of stuff that if you want to truly do a great job at it, you need passionate people with a lot of experience who are listening to their customers to deal with that area.

There, there’s no question like that we just, I think are wise and honestly, again, I come from the WordPress world actually many, many, many years ago. Notwithstanding the current kind of trouble that they’re having, but that, the ecosystem is what created that brand, is what raised that brand up.

And so many companies chose different areas to be excellent at and to bring that to the, to the community as a whole. And so I, I think when I look at these different areas that they’re huge businesses though, no question that these are also big businesses making sure that people stay safe, right?

That systems stay safe, like what you guys are doing. Those are rich and growing and plenty of money to be made and plenty of customers to help. But I, again, I still come back to that. I think for OpenStack and, and I’m excited that OpenInfra Foundation, I think is, is really finding ways to be more easily accessible whether it’s through some companies like us but that, that accessibility is making a big difference.

And again, we spoke about how to overcome, hey, look, I’m, I used to use this one brand, but now it’s just outta my reach or I need alternatives, or I need some of the fresh stuff and some of the, the quicker things that can happen in the open source world. You know, you, you want that, you want the ability for your team to be flexible, like you were saying before. Sometimes it’s harder as we age, I suppose would be the right way to say it. But knowing we watch there, 

Pawel: The others not we. No worries Todd here. 

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. Right. Well, I got the, I got, I got a little bit going there, 

Pawel: So, no, it’s I, I have a gray, but it’s, it’s about the light and it’s, it’s the light.

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that’s what keep telling yourself that. 

Alright. I know we’re down to the last couple minutes here. Anything else that we want to kind of talk through?

Oh, yeah. All right. So, yeah. All, well, I think that’s a nice statement. Thank you. Yeah. We’ve got that coming up. But yeah. So any other last things that we wanna close on, or if there’re yeah, maybe I’ll, I’ll, I was just check in with Lauren here on the back end to see if there’s anything that we, we want answer stuff that didn’t cover for sure.

Pawel: Yeah, my final statement is that look for the simplicity. I’m not saying that the Storware is the simplest software in the world because it’s not, you know, we are, we, we are not Windows base five clicks later on. You are, you need to have more experience. But we build the virtual appliance, we build the iso OVAs.

We, we have proper people behind the scenes that are touchable and reachable in case of any, any need. So they’re there to test it and plate whatever you have virtualization engine. Please try it and remember that if you are looking for the real alternative, the OpenStack, it’s one of my key suggestion.

It is not because I build the OpenStack support because I have more than different, 10 different actually 15 hypervisors protection. But this is where I personally believe this is a place to grow and this is a chance for the existing IT departments to, to build a new skillset. And the, the OpenMetal friends are the best let’s say starting point where you can do not kill yourself from the number of the different things, but you can start the OpenStack journey and get the specialized and so.

There to test it because it’s still, there’s a, there is a still too much hesitation and thinking about what to do next. There are some answers and our both companies are one of those who can help you to cope with it in, let’s say measure, let’s say timeframe. 

Todd: Yeah. Yeah. No, and again, I appreciate the, the kind words, and I, I always like to poke a little fun at my friend.

So actually he’s a customer now hunt.io if people wanna check that out. It’s a security company that helps really large organizations figure out what’s going on, on the internet. But I would always like to end it, like there may be new technology. This is built upon maturity that has been out there.

So for companies that are thinking about like, well, how do I have a viable alternative to some of these big VMwares or the big clouds? It is here, it is mature, and there’s a lot of leaders, Pawel, for the example, is very interested in seeing this success. So again, I, I really appreciate the kind words, and hopefully we get we’ve convinced a few people that there’s some more open source alternatives and that yeah, and that we can hopefully help them on their journey.

So I think we’ve got a drop off here, but I definitely, Pawel definitely appreciate it. I’m sorry we couldn’t do it in Polish. You, you were messing with me at the very beginning. And that would’ve been hard for me. I would’ve appreciated that.

Pawel: So we also always show showing that we are from the central Europe.

We are proud to be one of the European vendors. It’s not many in the backup space especially in Poland. You know, when you build in a company and nobody giving you a chance that you what you would like to do and how to build some something from the scratch. So I encourage everybody. It’s possible, but you need to have a willingness, a time and a huge amount of the energy. 

Todd: And the energy. 

Pawel: And the energy. Yeah. Infinite energy. So have a great day, Todd. Again, and OpenMetal team. Thank you for the invitation. It was great to to share my insights and experience in this field. 

Todd: Definitely appreciate it. All right, everybody, look up Storware.

All right. Take care all.